infrastructure

Learn from Google how to save electricity while serving millions of request across a globe. Google come up with 5-step approach to build efficient data centers. From the page:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Hundreds of millions of users access our services through the web, and supporting this traffic requires lots of computers. We strive to offer great internet services while taking our energy use very seriously. That’s why, almost a decade ago, we started our efforts to make our computing infrastructure as sustainable as possible. Today we are operating what we believe to be the world’s most efficient data centers.

As a result, the energy used per Google search is minimal. In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query.

I’m not surprised at all. Linux runs on tiny phone to large server systems. According to IDC researchers (prediction) – spending on the Linux ecosystem will rise from $21 billion in 2007 to more than $49 billion in 2011, driven by rising enterprise deployments of Linux server operating systems.

Linux server deployments are expanding from infrastructure-oriented applications to more commercially oriented database and enterprise resource-planning workloads “that historically have been the domain of Microsoft Windows and Unix,” noted IDC analysts in a white paper commissioned by the nonprofit Linux Foundation.

“The early adoption of Linux was dominated by infrastructure-oriented workloads, often taking over those workloads from an aging Unix server or Windows NT 4.0 server that was being replaced,” according to the report’s authors, Al Gillen, Elaina Stergiades and Brett Waldman. These days, however, Linux is increasingly being “viewed as a solution for wider and more critical business deployments.”

Red Hat has open-sourced its identity-management and security system to promote its assertion that open-source software provides the most secure infrastructure. From the press release:

Red Hat Certificate System was acquired from AOL three years ago as part of the Netscape technology acquisition. In keeping with our commitment to open source software, today Red Hat has released all of the source code to Red Hat Certificate System. Much of the technology in Red Hat Certificate System was already open source, including the Apache web server, Red Hat Directory Server and the FIPS140-2 level 2 validated NSS cryptographic libraries, but todayâ€™s move further demonstrates Red Hatâ€™s belief that the open source development model creates more secure software.

I think the freeIPA project is really good addition. It provides central management of identity, policy, and auditing for Unix and Linux using open-source and open-standards technologies.